Empiricism in Philosophy

1. Empiricism
Umm-e-Rooman Yaqoob

2. Empiricism:
• Empiricism is a theory which states that knowledge comes only or
primarily from sensory experience. One of several views of
epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with
rationalism and scepticism, empiricism emphasizes the role of
experience and evidence, especially sensory experience, in the
formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or traditions;
empiricists may argue however that traditions (or customs) arise
due to relations of previous sense experiences.

3. • Empiricism is the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense
experience. It emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,
especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, and
argues that the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori
(i.e. based on experience). Most empiricists also discount the
notion of innate ideas or innatism (the idea that the mind is born
with ideas or knowledge and is not a "blank slate" at birth).

4. Etymology:
• The English term "empirical" derives from the Greek word which is cognate
with and translates to the Latin experientia, from which we derive the word
"experience" and the related "experiment". The term was used by the Empiric
school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, who rejected the three doctrines
of the Dogmatic school, preferring to rely on the observation of "phenomena“.
• The term "empiricism" has a dual etymology, stemming both from the Greek
word for "experience" and from the more specific classical Greek and Roman
usage of "empiric", referring to a physician whose skill derives from practical
experience as opposed to instruction in theory (this was it's first usage).

5. • The term "empirical" (rather than "empiricism") also refers to the
method of observation and experiment used in the natural and social
sciences. It is a fundamental requirement of the scientific method that
all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the
natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition
or revelation. Hence, science is considered to be methodologically
empirical in nature.

6. History of Empiricism:
• The concept of a "tabula rasa" (or "clean slate") had been developed as early as
the 11th Century by the Persian philosopher Avicenna, who further argued that
knowledge is attained through empirical familiarity with objects in this world,
from which one abstracts universal concepts, which can then be further
developed through a syllogistic method of reasoning. The 12th Century Arabic
philosopher Abu acer (or Ibn Tu fail: 1105 - 1185) demonstrated the theory of
tabula rasa as a thought experiment in which the mind of a feral child develops
from a clean slate to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society on a
desert island, through experience alone.

7. The Centrality of Experience:
• Empiricists claim that all ideas that a mind can entertain have been formed
through some experiences or – to use a slightly more technical term – through
some impressions;
• Here is how David Hume expressed this creed:
"it must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea" .
• Indeed – Hume continues in Book II –
"all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more
lively ones".
• Under this characterization, empiricism is the claim that all human ideas are
less detailed copies of some experience or other.

8. DEGREES OF EMPIRICISM:
• Empiricism, whether concerned with concepts or knowledge, can be
held with varying degrees of strength.
• On this basis , these three forms can be distinguished:
 absolute empiricisms
 substantive empiricisms
 partial empiricisms

9.  ABSOLUTE EMPIRICISM:
• Absolute empiricists hold that there are no a priori concepts, either
formal or categorical, and no a priori beliefs or propositions.
Absolute empiricism about the former is more common than that
about the latter, however. Although nearly all Western
philosophers admit that obvious tautologies (e.g., “all red things
are red”) and definitional truisms (e.g., “all triangles have three
sides”) are a priori, many of them would add that these represent a
degenerate case.

10.  SUBSTANTIVE EMPIRICISM:
• A more moderate form of empiricism is that of the substantive
empiricists, who are unconvinced by attempts that have been
made to interpret formal concepts empirically and who therefore
concede that formal concepts are a priori, though they deny that
status to categorical concepts and to the theoretical concepts of
physics, which they hold are a posteriori. According to this view,
allegedly a priori categorical and theoretical concepts are either
defective, reducible to empirical concepts, or merely useful
“fictions” for the prediction and organization of experience.

11.  PARTIAL EMPIRICISM:
• The least thoroughgoing type of empiricism here distinguished, ranking third in
degree, can be termed partial empiricism. According to this view, the realm of
the a priori includes some concepts that are not formal and some propositions
that are substantially informative about the world. The theses of the
transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1720–1804), the general scientific
conservation laws, the basic principles of morality and theology, and the causal
laws of nature have all been held by partial empiricists to be both “synthetic”
and a priori. At any rate, in all versions of partial empiricism there remain a
great many straightforwardly a posteriori concepts and propositions: ordinary
singular propositions about matters of fact and the concepts that figure in them
are held to fall in this domain.

12. THE BRITISH EMPIRICISTS:
• In the 17th and 18th Century, the members of the British
Empiricism school John Locke, George Berkeley and David
Hume were the primary exponents of Empiricism. They
vigorously defended Empiricism against the Rationalism of
Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza.

13. o John Locke:
• John Locke was an empiricist in roughly the same sense
that Aquinas was, and he set the tone for his successors. His
"new way of ideas," as it was called, had as its purpose "to
inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human
knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of
belief, opinion, and assent. "Locke wanted to assess the
certainty of our knowledge as well as its extent.

14. o Berkeley:
• Berkeley's main aim was to produce a metaphysical view which
would show the glory of God. According to this view, there is nothing
which our understanding cannot grasp, and our perceptions can be
regarded as a kind of divine language by which God speaks to us; for
God is the cause of our perceptions. There exist, therefore, only
sensations or ideas and spirits which are their cause. God is the cause
of our sensations, and we ourselves can be the cause of ideas of the
imagination.

15. o Hume:
• Hume distinguished first between impressions and ideas. He
further subdivided ideas into those of sense and those of
reflection, and again, into those which are simple and those
which are complex. He denied the existence of anything behind
impressions, and a cardinal point of his empiricism, to which he
returned again and again, was that every simple idea is a copy of
a corresponding impression. Hume's main method in
philosophy was what he called the "experimental method“.

16. o John Stuart Mill:
• He claimed that mathematical truths were merely very highly
confirmed generalizations from experience , he set down as founded
on induction. Thus, in Mill's philosophy there was no real place for
knowledge based on relations of ideas. In his view logical and
mathematical necessity is psychological; we are merely unable to
conceive any other possibilities than those which logical and
mathematical propositions assert. This is perhaps the most extreme
version of empiricism known, but it has not found many defenders.

17. 20th CENTURY EMPIRICISM:
• In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, several forms of Pragmatism
arose, which attempted to integrate the apparently mutually-exclusive insights
of Empiricism (experience-based thinking) and Rationalism (concept-based
thinking). C. S. Peirce and William James (who coined the term "radical
empiricism" to describe an offshoot of his form of Pragmatism) were
particularly important in this endeavour

18. • Empiricists in the twentieth century have generally reverted to the
radical distinction between necessary truths, as found in logic and
mathematics, and empirical truths, as found elsewhere. Necessity is
confined by them, however, to logic and mathematics, and all other
truths are held to be merely contingent. Partly for this reason and
partly because it has been held that the apparatus of modern logic may
be relevant to philosophical problems, twentieth-century empiricists
have tended to call them-selves "Logical Empiricists“.

19. Development of Empiricism :
• The next step in the development of Empiricism was Logical Empiricism (or
Logical Positivism), an early 20th Century attempt to synthesize the essential
ideas of British Empiricism (a strong emphasis on sensory experience as the
basis for knowledge) with certain insights from mathematical logic that had
been developed by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
This resulted in a kind of extreme Empiricism which held that any genuinely
synthetic assertion must be reducible to an ultimate assertion (or set of
ultimate assertions) which expresses direct observations or perceptions.

20. Skepticism:
• The Scottish philosopher David Hume brought to the Empiricist viewpoint an
extreme Scepticism. He argued that all of human knowledge can be divided
into two categories: relations of ideas (e.g. propositions involving some
contingent observation of the world, such as "the sun rises in the East") and
matters of fact (e.g. mathematical and logical propositions), and that ideas are
derived from our "impressions" or sensations. In the face of this, he argued
that even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, or even in the
existence of the self, cannot be conclusively established by reason, but we
accept them anyway because of their basis in instinct and custom.

21. Rationalism and Empiricism:
• The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the
extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in
our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are
significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are
gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim
that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our
concepts and knowledge.

22. • Rationalists generally develop their view in two ways. First, they argue that
there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips
the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they construct
accounts of how reason in some form or other provides that additional
information about the world.
• Empiricists present complementary lines of thought. First, they develop
accounts of how experience provides the information that rationalists cite,
insofar as we have it in the first place. Second, empiricists attack the
rationalists' accounts of how reason is a source of concepts or knowledge.

23. Conclusion:
• Empiricism is the philosophical stance according to which the
senses are the ultimate source of human knowledge. It rivals
rationalism according to which reason is the ultimate source of
knowledge. In a form or another, empiricism is a chapter of most
philosophical tradition. In Western philosophy, empiricism boasts
a long and distinguished list of followers in all ages; probably the
most fertile moment for this trend happened during the early
modernity, with the so-called British empiricists, whose rank
includes authors of the calibre of John Locke and David Hume.